Bing Webmaster Tools: keyword research and backlinks analysis

First launched in 2009 as Bing Webmaster Center, Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's counterpart to the popular Google Search Console. It is a collection of utilities that you can access for free, and that allows you to add your website to the Bing search engine. You can then monitor the performance of your pages on Bing, with data about clicks and impressions, and optimize your site to achieve a better ranking.

Recently Bing Webmaster Tools introduced a set of innovative SEO tools for keyword research, SEO scan reports, and backlinks analysis.

You might want to consider Bing Webmaster Tools not just to index your pages on Bing Search, and to improve their rankings. The service helps you to understand what people are searching for and what leads them to your site.

It can be a great tool to get more traffic to your website, depending on your target audience.

According to StatCounter, Bing accounts for a 3% of the search engine queries in the Netherlands (Google scores a 94.6%).

And what demographic uses Bing the most? In the US, where Bing has a larger user base, its average user is 35+, not particularly techy using Internet Explorer at work.

To use Bing Webmaster Tools, you first need to create an account. You can sign up with an existing Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account.

The next step is to add and verify your websites. The verification step is needed to prove that you are the owner of the web property. Read the verification methods available.

Another way to verify your websites is to connect Bing Webmaster Tools with your Google Search Console. This will share effectively data between the two services.

Up until recently, there were no rich snippets on Bing Search results. With this, I am referring to the visually rich widgets that you see more and more when you perform a search on Google. Only in late 2020, Bing started introducing rich-featured results, to deliver a new search experience that is intuitive and engaging.

I opened this article by mentioning the advanced SEO features that were introduced with the latest release of Bing Webmaster Tools.

The new SEO tools let you analyze backlinks and research keywords volume. They are developed to give you an edge on your SEO optimization efforts.

Backlinks analysis

Backlinks are the links that point from 3rd party domains towards your website. As you are aware, backlinks are an important signal that influences the position of your pages on search engines; both on Bing and Google.

Bing Webmaster Tools lets you view the backlink profile of your site, and helps you analyze:

• The referring domains that point towards your site
• The exact pages that link your website
• The anchor texts of these links, meaning the words that the hyperlink displays on the link to your pages
• The backlinks of your competitors
• The option to disavow unwanted links

The possibility of checking the backlinks of your competition, websites you don't own, is a feature that is not present on Google Search Console and that is usually part of dedicated, expensive SEO tools. It's a very important feature to develop your SEO strategy while keeping an eye on your competitors.

There are some limitations though: Bing Webmaster Tools only tells you which domains are linking your competitors; it does not show the exact pages where the links are, nor the anchor texts.

Bing Webmaster Tools also seems to exclude links from social media networks: while Google Search Console does show links from sites like Pinterest, Reddit, or Medium pointing to your domain, these seem to be missing on Bing Webmaster Tools.

Google Search Console also shows the internal link structure, which are the links between your pages. This is also a factor that influences how a search engine indexes your pages; this information is missing on Bing Webmaster Tools.

The debate on SEO forums about the impact of low-quality links is still open. On one hand, Google never encouraged the practice of disavowing links; its algorithm is powerful enough to recognize spam and to make sure it does not damage the ranking of legit websites.

On the other hand, many SEO specialists have first-hand experience that shows the contrary. And the fact that both Google and Bing make disavow tools available is somehow telling and reinforces the belief that low-quality backlinks do have a negative impact on search ranking.

Keyword Research tool

Keyword Research is another feature that you would usually find on dedicated SEO tools, such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, or the various apps that focus on keyword planning.

Bing Webmaster Tools allows you to view the queries that people search for on Bing, and their corresponding search volumes for a selected country, language, and device type.

The tool can show the number of impressions over a custom period limited to the last 6 months.

The keyword research tool embedded in Bing Webmaster Tools also shows:

• Related keywords
• Question keywords, which are helpful to understand the way people perform their searches

Here's an important disclaimer: the data that Bing provides as keyword search volume is, of course, based on Bing searches. Since the vast majority of Bing users are in the US, the keyword research tool will provide plenty of data about US searches, while it will often return "No Data Available" for keywords in other languages, or English keywords on a location other than the US.

The results seem limited, and this is noticeable even when you set the correct language for the keyword.

As for the other sections of Bing Webmaster Tools, the UI of the new keyword research tool is very clear and it does show potential for this functionality to grow. For each keyword, the current top 10 ranking search results are also shown on the page.

SEO Reports

SEO reports list an aggregated count of the errors and warnings that the Bing bot encountered while scanning your website. These errors are grouped for High, Moderate, or Low severity.

In my experience, the outcomes are not always in line with a SEO scan performed by Google Search Console. For instance, Bing Webmaster Tools reports as high priority the error:

"There are multiple <h1> tags on the page"

Which I’m not sure it’s a practice that Google penalizes. If you search online, you’ll find several discussions on forums. The consensus seems to be that an HTML page there can contain multiple <article> tags. Each <article> can very well contain a heading <h1>.

What I can guess is that Bing does not like this and that Bing Webmaster Tools reports it as an error that should be fixed.

As the Bing documentation points out, SEO Reports will run automatically on your website twice a month, providing you with updated reports that you can use to optimize your ranking on search engines.

Site Scan

Site Scan is an audit tool with which you can ask Bing to crawl your site on demand. Like the SEO Report function, it notifies you about errors or warnings like:

• Page title, description, or h1 too long;
• Alt attributes on images missing;

You can request to start a new site scan. Once the scan is done, the report will be archived so that you can access it later, or compare it with previous site scans.

Interestingly, a few of my pages received this warning: “Html size is too long”.

The inline help for this issue explains that:

The evaluated size of HTML is estimated to be over 125 KB and risks not being fully cached. Search engines may not fully acquire the content on a page if the page contains a lot of code.

The pages Bing Webmaster Tools is reporting are long not because of code, but due to the actual content of the page, the text readable by users.

Bing seems to consider this an issue.

Crawl control

Bing Webmaster Tools lets you control when the Bing bot will crawl your website. You can set your time preferences, depending on how the daily flow of traffic to your website is distributed over the 24h. Bing will crawl the least during the most convenient period, to minimize interference in available bandwidth.

“Bing Analytics” does not exist, yet. Bing does not offer tracking and analytics software that is equivalent to Google Analytics.

Yet there is a new, different tracking tool that has a deep connection with Bing Webmaster Tools and that provides data about the user behavior on your website. This tool is Microsoft Clarity, introduced in late 2020.

For event tracking and web analytics, another solution offered by Microsoft that is also integrated with Bing Webmaster Tools is the Microsoft Advertising platform.